Project 104: The Georgians

This week's project was prompted by the local Stamford Georgian Festival (although we didn't quite make as much use of the festival as we had planned).

We started the week with the usual collection of videos and readings about the Georgians, including our Ladybird Histories: British History, which gave a nice overview, and some of the Great Stories of British History. We also watched two 'films' associated with the period - the Gulliver's Travels mini-series (starring Ted Danson) and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times.

Gulliver's travels was picked as it was written at the start of the Georgian period. Both the children really enjoyed the mini-series and Usborne's abridged version of the Lilliput part of the story, but unfortunately the unabridged version is a bit beyond them for now (although Monica was game enough to give it a go). With so much to the book, beyond that of a simple adventure, we will definitely return to the full version when they are a bit bigger.

While Modern Times is not a film set in the Georgian period, it nonetheless reflects the impact of the industrial revolution that was heavily discussed during the week. It's always good to watch non-Disney films with the children and broaden their viewing habits, and they both really enjoyed it (although admittedly the 'nose-powder' drug scene isn't typically classed as family-friendly viewing these days).

We also explored Joseph Wright of Derby's 1768 An Experiment on A Bird in the Air Pump, using the book Old Masters Rock: How to look at art with children, and then got the children to write a short piece about the picture.

Old Masters Rock

Unfortunately, towards the end of the week everyone came down with a bug, so the only part of the Georgian festival that we managed to attend was The Georgian Sense-O-Matic Show, which according to Solomon's scathing review was about "1% Georgian" and repeated much of the work we had done the week before in Project 103: The Five Senses.

Sense-O-Matic

Next project: Harvest Festival